The Greek Gamble and a Fending Off of the Apocalypse

The sun came up this morning. Pieces of the sky were not all over my lawn. I know. I checked.

Thank you, Greece.

Apparently, we all avoided cosmic catastrophe because the Greeks went out and (probably) elected a government that will please some German bankers, the prime minister of England, a whole corps of American op-ed editors, a chorus of millionnaire pundits, and the entire on-air staffs of CNBC and the Fox Business Channel. Whether it will actually please the Greeks is, of course, beside the point, because who cares about all that national sovereignity stuff now anyway?

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The only force that binds us and gives us meaning is the inexorable force of global capitalism. And now, it appears, that The Markets have finished throwing the duckboat parade for themselves and are edging back to being gloomy, primarily about that struggling monetary organizing unit once known as "Spain." Hard times are coming for the average Spaniard, I'm thinking, because that will be best for Maria Bartiromo's portfolio. Sacrifices will have to be made. By other people.

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As I often point out, the blog is not an economist, nor does it play one on the radio, or on the electric television set. It has one primary economic principle — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money — and it has one primary economic belief: namely, that, in practicing their craft, most economists are not too far removed from cutting up doves on a rock and reading their entrails. (All economics is in some way voodoo economics.) However, it's becoming plain to the blog that the Eurozone may be many things. It may be the Fast And Furious of economic geopolitics, something that looked really swell in the boardrooms when they drew it up, but which, in practice, is the functional equivalent of handing AK's over to drug lunatics. It may be one giant long con in which ordinary Europeans are the marks. It may be an unusually elaborate protection racket, or it may be the world's largest casino. Hell, it may be the Fourth Reich. But, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to have a political component to it at all. There doesn't seem to be anything holding the European "Union" together except balance sheets. Unfortunately for the people with the big piles of money, nations continue to be locked into the obsolete concept of having governments of their own, and those governments become the only refuge of millions of individuals who find themselves buffeted by the glorious new era of pushbutton high-finance. So the institutions making up the latter, being largely big, dumb brutes, cannot help but go tromping all over the institutions making up the former, and we have an irreconcilable conflict between faceless supra-national capitalism and representative self-government. You have German bankers telling Greeks how miserable their lives have to be for the next several decades and when the Greeks, rightly, say phooey to all of this, they do so through the only institution over which they have any say — to wit, their government. Of course, this demonstration of Greeks being Greek outrages and frightens the entire world, which spends several months telling the Greeks that, if they don't vote the right way, grass will be growing in the streets of New York and London by nightfall. Oh, and that their lives will be made even more miserable. So the Greeks vote the way the world wants them to vote, and the Four Horsemen take it back to the barn for a few weeks, and nobody ever stops being smart long enough to wonder if any of this makes sense at all.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)